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Forum:County Pages
Subject was begun in 2007 See Forum:County Pages Idea. Boxes at top of county pages Just wondering about the links within county pages such as those listed in the box at the top of each county article. Is there a standard format for listing births, marriages, residents, etc.? What kind of sources should be listed? TreeGenea3 05:02, 2 July 2008 (UTC) :Those boxes are probably all the standardising that we need!!!!! Please write whatever and however you like, anything that other genealogists might be interested in. That's my 2 cents' worth anyway. If you think some standardisation would be good, try a few pages then come back to this page and give us links to them so that we can admire and follow (maybe not blindly). --Robin Patterson 09:53, 2 July 2008 (UTC) ::Great! I'll get started. I appreciate your kind response! --TreeGenea3 20:57, 2 July 2008 (UTC) :::Here's what I'm thinking. To make it easier to get started, I simply listed family names (in CAPS, of course) as I come across them in my research. I'll attempt to put them in alphabetical order to make it easier for end-users to find a particular surname they are hoping to find. Right now, I'm using U.S.Census information and putting that source at the bottom with the format: year(decade) U.S. Census: State/County. My goal is to include the years that certain families resided within that county such as: ::::*WALKER, 1840s to 1860s ::::*WOODWORTH, 1820s to 1880s :::To see what I've done you can go to the county page, Ashtabula County, Ohio and click on the "Residents" link (People) in the format box. Category:Resided in Ashtabula County, Ohio --TreeGenea3 20:49, 4 July 2008 (UTC) ::::Pretty good work. (I reached it the quick way - straight from its record in Recent Changes.) But I've moved it to an ordinary page (with the same "pagename") because a category page should not have more than a screenful of text so that its primary lists - the subcategories and articles - don't get pushed out of sight. See my yesterday's note below this as background. Robin Patterson 08:35, 5 July 2008 (UTC) :One point that I noticed yesterday when trying to find a better place for the message that a searcher left on the Maiden name page: some of those boxes lead to categories, which are, of course, not where we encourage people to write paragraphs of text/questions/suggestions. So the sort of thing I presume TG3 wants is best on one of the pages that are not categories; I should spend some time seeing if we can gently lead people to such pages. Robin Patterson 12:09, 3 July 2008 (UTC) :Yes, more work has now been done on those, notably with Template:Catmore+. Please see Forum:County subpages - categorising for a recent development. Robin Patterson 00:53, 11 September 2008 (UTC) Census data at county level TG3 (above) reports on extracting material from census data. Good. And quoting the source, of course. In theory the site can benefit from having complete searchable transcripts of all censuses (to the extent permitted by copyright law). We have a page or two for each U.S. census. We had discussions and an argument about how to name them. All was resolved bloodlessly. I forget what the result was, and I don't think we have yet implemented most of the agreed changes, but they should (eventually if not already) be under Category:Census and we can redirect to the "correct" names (once finalised) where required. At state and county level, we can have separate pages too, and there is likely to be no greater level of standardisation than for the U.S. as a whole; probably the reverse. See Forum:Census pages for the sorts of names that are used elsewhere. So the same applies - if you can't readily find a standard-looking model page name, call it what you like and we will find something to redirect it to if necessary. A page name starting with the year does seem to be the majority preference. Helps someone searching through an alphanumeric list (e.g. Category:Censuses) for ideas of where to look for an ancestor, because all that are impossibly early or late can be very easily eliminated from consideration. Next element should probably be "census of country" so that the searcher can easily eliminate a whole lot more unless the ancestor's movements aren't known with certainty. So a workable standard could be like "1790 census of the United States/Pennsylvania...". Robin Patterson 10:38, 5 July 2008 (UTC) No objections in 2 months, so you can expect me to take the above as consensus. Robin Patterson 11:57, 24 September 2008 (UTC) Now the county CATEGORIES Some of you may have noticed that many of those county pages your people now link to have no corresponding categories yet. There will eventually be lots of useful pages and subcategories collected in those county categories (e.g. Category:Greene County, Ohio). See Forum:County-based categories for more on that subject (some of it just moved from here). Robin Patterson 11:57, 24 September 2008 (UTC)